Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer is the decisive figure in the development of
twentieth century hermeneutics—almost certainly eclipsing, in
terms of influence and reputation, the other leading figures,
including Paul Ricoeur, and also Gianni Vattimo (Vattimo was himself
one of Gadamer’s students). Trained in neo-Kantian scholarship, as
well as in classical philology, and profoundly affected by the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Gadamer developed a distinctive and
thoroughly dialogical approach, grounded in Platonic-Aristotelian as
well as Heideggerian thinking, that rejects subjectivism and
relativism, abjures any simple notion of interpretive method, and
grounds understanding in the linguistically mediated happening of
tradition. Employing a more orthodox and modest, but also more
accessible style than Heidegger himself, Gadamer’s work can be seen as
concentrated in four main areas: the first, and clearly the most
influential, is the development and elaboration of a philosophical
hermeneutics; the second is the dialogue within philosophy, and within
the history of philosophy, with respect to Plato and Aristotle in
particular, but also with Hegel and Heidegger; the third is the
engagement with literature, particularly poetry, and with art; and the
fourth is what Gadamer himself terms ‘practical
philosophy’ (Gadamer 2001, 78–85) encompassing contemporary
political and ethical issues. The ‘dialogical’ character
of Gadamer’s approach is evident, not merely in the central
theoretical role he gives to the concept of dialogue in his thinking,
but also in the discursive and dialogic, even
‘conversational’, character of his writing, as well as in
his own personal commitment to intellectual engagement and
exchange. Indeed, he is one of the few philosophers for whom the
‘interview’ has become a significant category of
philosophical output (see Hahn 1997, 588–599; also Gadamer 2001,
2003). Although he identified connections between his own work and
English-speaking ‘analytic’ thought (mainly via the later
Wittgenstein, but also Donald Davidson), and has sometimes seen his
ideas taken up by thinkers such as Alasdair McIntyre (see MacIntyre
2002), Ronald Dworkin (see Dworkin 1986), Robert Brandom (see Brandom
2002), John McDowell (see McDowell 1996, 2002), and especially Richard
Rorty (Rorty 1979), Gadamer is perhaps less well known, and certainly
less well-appreciated, in philosophical circles outside Europe than
are some of his near-contemporaries. He is undoubtedly, however, one
of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, having had an
enormous impact on a range of areas from aesthetics to jurisprudence,
and having acquired a respect and reputation in Germany, and elsewhere
in Europe, that went far beyond the usual confines of academia.

Born on February 11, 1900, in Marburg, in Southern Germany,
Gadamer grew up in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland), where his father
was Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Breslau, later taking
the Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Marburg. Gadamer’s family
background was Protestant, and his father was sternly Prussian. His
mother died of diabetes when Gadamer was only four, and he had no
surviving brothers or sisters. Showing an early interest in humanistic
studies, Gadamer began university studies in Breslau in 1918 (studying
with Richard Hoenigswald), moving to Marburg with his father in
1919. Gadamer completed his doctoral studies at Marburg in 1922 (in
his own words, ‘too young’—see Gadamer 1997b, 7)
with a dissertation on Plato. In that same year, Gadamer also
contracted poliomyelitis, from which he recovered only slowly, and the
after-effects of which remained with him for the rest of his life.

Gadamer’s early teachers at Marburg were Paul Natorp and Nicolai
Hartmann. Paul Friedlander introduced him to philological study, and
Gadamer also received encouragement from Rudolf Bultmann. It was,
however, Martin Heidegger (at Marburg from 1923–1928) who exerted the
most important and enduring effect on Gadamer’s philosophical
development. Gadamer had first met Heidegger in Frieburg in early
1923, having also corresponded with him in 1922. Yet although Gadamer
was a key figure in Heidegger’s Marburg circle, working as Heidegger’s
unpaid assistant, by 1925 Heidegger had became quite critical of
Gadamer’s philosophical capacities and contributions. As a result,
Gadamer decided to abandon philosophy for classical
philology. (Gadamer was not alone in being the recipient of such
criticism—Heidegger was also unimpressed by Jacob Klein and was
certainly prone to deliver harsh judgments on his students and
colleagues—but Gadamer seems to have been more particularly
affected by it.) Through his philological work, however, Gadamer seems
to have regained Heidegger’s respect, passing the State Examination in
Classical Philology in 1927, with Friedlander and Heidegger as two of
the three examiners, and then going on to submit his habilitation
dissertation (‘Plato’s Dialectical Ethics’, [1991]), in
1928, under Friedlander and Heidegger’s guidance. Gadamer’s
relationship with Heidegger remained relatively close throughout their
respective careers, even though it was also a relationship that held
considerable tension—at least on Gadamer’s side.

Gadamer’s first academic appointment was to a junior position in
Marburg in 1928, finally achieving a lower-level professorship there
in 1937. In the meantime, from 1934–35, Gadamer held a temporary
professorship at Kiel, and then, in 1939, took up the Directorship of
the Philosophical Institute at the University of Leipzig, becoming
Dean of the Faculty in 1945, and Rector in 1946, before returning to
teaching and research at Frankfurt-am-Main in 1947. In 1949, he
succeeded Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, officially retiring (becoming
Professor Emeritus) in 1968. Following his retirement, he travelled
extensively, spending considerable time in North America, where he was
a visitor at a number of institutions and developed an especially
close and regular association with Boston College in
Massachusetts.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Gadamer was able to accommodate himself,
on his account, reluctantly, first to National Socialism and then
briefly, to Communism. While Gadamer did not identify himself strongly
with either regime (he was never a member of the National Socialist
Party, although he did belong to the affiliated National Socialist
Teachers Union), neither did he draw attention to himself by outright
opposition. However some have seen his stance as too acquiescent, and
others have argued that he was indeed supportive of the Nazi
dictatorship or of some aspects of it (see Wolin 2000 as well as the
reply in Palmer 2002; see also the discussion in Krejewski 2003,
169–306; for Gadamer’s own comments on this issue, see
Gadamer 2001).

In 1953, together with Helmut Kuhn, Gadamer founded the highly
influential Philosophische Rundschau, but his main
philosophical impact was not felt until the publication of Truth
and Method in 1960 (1989b). Gadamer’s best known
publications almost all date from the period after Truth and
Method, and in this respect much of his philosophical reputation
rests on publications either after or in the decade just before his
transition to emeritus status (in 1968). The important debates in
which Gadamer engaged with Emilio Betti, Jürgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida all took place in this latter part of Gadamer’s
philosophical career, and the translation of his work into English
also began only quite late, in the 1970s.

Gadamer was twice married: in 1923, to Frida Kratz (later divorced),
with whom he had one daughter (born in 1926), and, in 1950, to
Käte Lekebusch. Gadamer received numerous awards and prizes
including, in 1971, Knight of the ‘Order of
Merit’—the highest academic honor awarded in
Germany. Remaining intellectually active until the very end of his
life (he held regular office hours even in his nineties), Gadamer died
in Heidelberg on March 13, 2002, at the age of 102.

Gadamer’s thinking began and always remained connected with Greek
thought, especially that of Plato and Aristotle. In this respect,
Gadamer’s early engagement with Plato, which lay at the core of both
his doctoral and habilitation dissertations, was determinative of much
of the character and philosophical direction of his thinking. Under
the influence of his early teachers such as Hartmann, as well as
Friedlander, Gadamer developed an approach to Plato that rejected the
idea of any ‘hidden’ doctrine in Plato’s thought, looking
instead to the structure of the Platonic dialogues themselves as the
key to understanding Plato’s philosophy. The only way to understand
Plato, as Gadamer saw it, was thus by working through the Platonic
texts in a way that not only enters into the dialogue and dialectic
set out in those texts, but also repeats that dialogic movement in the
attempt at understanding as such. Moreover, the dialectical structure
of Platonic questioning also provides the model for a way of
understanding that is open to the matter at issue through bringing
oneself into question along with the matter itself. Under the
influence of Heidegger, Gadamer also took up, as a central element in
his thinking, the idea of phronesis (‘practical
wisdom’) that appears in Book VI of Aristotle’s Nichomachean
Ethics. For Heidegger the concept of phronesis is
important, not only as a means of giving emphasis to our practical
‘being-in-the world’ over and against theoretical
apprehension, but it can additionally be seen as constituting a mode
of insight into our own concrete situation (both our practical
situation and, more fundamentally, our existential situation, hence
phronesis constitutes a mode of self-knowledge). The way in
which Gadamer conceives of understanding, and interpretation, is as
just such a practically oriented mode of insight—a mode of
insight that has its own rationality irreducible to any simple rule or
set of rules, that cannot be directly taught, and that is always
oriented to the particular case at hand. The concept of
phronesis can itself be seen as providing a certain
elaboration of the dialogic conception of understanding Gadamer had
already found in Plato. Taken together, phronesis and
dialogue provide the essential starting point for the development of
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

Traditionally, hermeneutics is taken to have its origins in problems
of biblical exegesis and in the development of a theoretical framework
to govern and direct such exegetical practice. In the hands of
eighteenth and early nineteenth century theorists, writers such as
Chladenius and Meier, Ast and Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was
developed into a more encompassing theory of textual interpretation in
general—a set of rules that provide the basis for good interpretive
practice no matter what the subject matter. Inasmuch as hermeneutics
is the method proper to the recovery of meaning, so Wilhelm Dilthey
broadened hermeneutics still further, taking it as the methodology for
the recovery of meaning that is essential to understanding within the
‘human’ or ‘historical’ sciences (the
Geisteswissenschaften). For these writers, as for many
others, the basic problem of hermeneutics was methodological: how to
found the human sciences, and so how to found the science of
interpretation, in a way that would make them properly
‘scientific’. Moreover, if the mathematical models and
procedures that appeared to be the hallmark of the sciences of nature
could not be duplicated in the human sciences, then the task at issue
must involve finding an alternative methodology proper to the human
sciences as such—hence Schleiermacher’s ambition to develop a
formal methodology that would codify interpretive practice, while
Dilthey aimed at the elaboration of a ‘psychology’ that
would elucidate and guide interpretive understanding.

Already familiar with earlier hermeneutic thinking, Heidegger
redeployed hermeneutics to a very different purpose and within a very
different frame. In Heidegger’s early thinking, particularly the
lectures from the early 1920s (‘The Hermeneutics of Facticity’),
hermeneutics is presented as that by means of which the investigation
of the basic structures of factical existence is to be pursued—not
as that which constitutes a ‘theory’ of textual
interpretation nor a method of ‘scientific’ understanding,
but rather as that which allows the self-disclosure of the structure
of understanding as such. The ‘hermeneutic circle’ that
had been a central idea in previous hermeneutic thinking, and that had
been viewed in terms of the interpretative interdependence, within any
meaningful structure, between the parts of that structure and the
whole, was transformed by Heidegger, so that it was now seen as
expressing the way in which all understanding was ‘always
already’ given over to that which is to be understood (to
‘the things themselves’—‘die Sachen
selbst’). Thus, to take a simple example, if we wish to
understand some particular artwork, we already need to have some prior
understanding of that work (even if only as a set of paint marks on
canvas), otherwise it cannot even be seen as something to be
understood. To put the point more generally, and in more basic
ontological terms, if we are to understand anything at all, we must
already find ourselves ‘in’ the world ‘along
with’ that which is to be understood. All understanding that is
directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based
in a prior ‘ontological’ understanding—a prior
hermeneutical situatedness. On this basis, hermeneutics can be
understood as the attempt to ‘make explicit’ the structure
of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to
any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed
even in the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the
explication of this situatedness—of this basic ontological mode of
understanding—is essentially a matter of exhibiting or
‘laying-bare’ a structure with which we are already
familiar (the structure that is present in every event of
understanding), and, in this respect, hermeneutics becomes one with
phenomenology, itself understood, in Heidegger’s thinking, as just
such a ‘laying bare’.

It is hermeneutics, in this Heideggerian and phenomenological sense,
that is taken up in Gadamer’s work, and that leads him, in conjunction
with certain other insights from Heidegger’s later thinking, as well as
the ideas of dialogue and practical wisdom, to elaborate a
philosophical hermeneutics that provides an account of the nature of
understanding in its universality (where this refers both to the
ontologically fundamental character of the hermeneutical situation and
the all-encompassing nature of hermeneutic practice) and, in the
process, to develop a response to the earlier hermeneutic tradition’s
preoccupation with the problem of interpretive method. In these
respects, Gadamer’s work, in conjunction with that of Heidegger,
represents a radical reworking of the idea of hermeneutics that
constitutes a break with the preceding hermeneutical tradition, and yet
also reflects back on that tradition. Gadamer thus develops a
philosophical hermeneutics that provides an account of the proper
ground for understanding, while nevertheless rejecting the attempt,
whether in relation to the Geisteswissenschaften or elsewhere,
to found understanding on any method or set of rules. This is not a
rejection of the importance of methodological concerns, but rather an
insistence on the limited role of method and the priority of
understanding as a dialogic, practical, situated activity.

In 1936 Heidegger gave three lectures on ‘The Origin of the Work
of Art’. In these lectures, not published until 1950, Heidegger
connects art with truth, arguing that the essence of the artwork is
not its ‘representational’ character, but rather its
capacity to allow the disclosure of a world. Thus the Greek temple
establishes the ‘Greek’ world and in so doing allows
things to take on a particular appearance within that world. Heidegger
refers to this event of disclosure as the event of
‘truth’. The sense of truth at issue here is one that
Heidegger presents in explicit contrast to what he views as the
traditional concept of truth as ‘correctness’. Such correctness
is usually taken to consist in some form of correspondence between
individual statements and the world, but so-called
‘coherence’ accounts of truth, according to which truth is
a matter of the consistency of a statement with a larger body of
statements, can also be viewed as based upon the same underlying
notion of truth as ‘correctness’. While Heidegger does not
abandon the notion of truth as ‘correctness’, he argues that it
is derivative of a more basic sense of truth as what he terms
‘unconcealment’. Understood in this latter sense, truth is
not a property of statements as they stand in relation to the world,
but rather an event or process in and through which both the things of
the world and what is said about them come to be revealed at one and
the same time—the possibility of ‘correctness’ arises on the
basis of just such ‘unconcealment’.

It is important to recognize, however, that the unconcealment at issue
is not a matter of the bringing about of some form of complete and
absolute transparency. The revealing of things is, in fact, always
dependent upon other things being simultaneously concealed (in much
the same way as seeing something in one way depends on not seeing it
in another). Truth is thus understood as the unconcealment that allows
things to appear, and that also makes possible the truth and falsity
of individual statements, and yet which arises on the basis of the
ongoing play between unconcealment and concealment—a play
that, for the most part, remains itself hidden and is never capable of
complete elucidation. In the language Heidegger employs in ‘The
Origin of the Work of Art’, the unconcealment of
‘world’ is thereby grounded in the concealment of
‘earth’. It is this sense of truth as the emergence of
things into unconcealment that occurs on the basis of the play between
concealing and unconcealing that is taken by Heidegger as the essence
(or ‘origin’) of the work of art. This idea of truth, as
well as the poetic language Heidegger employed in his exposition, had
a decisive effect on Gadamer’s own thinking. Indeed, Gadamer described
his philosophical hermeneutics as precisely an attempt “to take up and
elaborate this line of thinking from the later Heidegger” (Gadamer
1997b, 47)

There are two crucial elements to Gadamer’s appropriation of Heidegger
here: first, the focus on art, and the connection of art with truth;
second, the focus on truth itself as the event of prior and partial
disclosure (or more properly, of concealment/unconcealment) in which
we are already involved and that can never be made completely
transparent. Both of these elements are connected with Gadamer’s
response to the subjectivist and idealist elements in German thought
that were present in the neo-Kantian tradition, and, more
specifically, in romantic hermeneutics and aesthetic theory. As
Gadamer saw it, aesthetic theory had, largely under the influence of
Kant, become alienated from the actual experience of art—the
response to art had become abstracted and
‘aestheticised’—while aesthetic judgment had become
purely a matter of taste, and so of subjective response. Similarly,
under the influence of the ‘scientific’ historiography of
those such as Ranke, together with the romantic hermeneutics associated with
Schleiermacher and others, the desire for objectivity had led to the
separation of historical understanding from the contemporary situation
that motivates it, and to a conception of historical method as based
in the reconstruction of the subjective experiences of the
author—a reconstruction that, as Hegel made clear, is surely
impossible (see Gadamer 1989b, 164–9).

By turning back to the direct experience of art, and to the concept of
truth as prior and partial disclosure, Gadamer was able to develop an
alternative to subjectivism that also connected with the ideas of
dialogue and practical wisdom taken from Plato and Aristotle, and of
hermeneutical situatedness taken from the early Heidegger. Just as the
artwork is taken as central and determining in the experience of art,
so is understanding similarly determined by the matter to be
understood; as the experience of art reveals, not in spite of, but
precisely because of the way it also conceals, so understanding is
possible, not in spite of, but precisely because of its prior
involvement. In Gadamer’s developed work, the concept of
‘play’ (Spiel) has an important
role here. Gadamer takes play as the basic clue to the ontological
structure of art, emphasizing the way in which play is not a form of
disengaged, disinterested exercise of subjectivity, but is rather
something that has its own order and structure to which one is given
over. The structure of play has obvious affinities with all of the
other concepts at issue here—of dialogue, phronesis, the
hermeneutical situation, the truth of art. Indeed, one can take all
of these ideas as providing slightly different elaborations of what is
essentially the same basic conception of understanding—one that
takes our finitude, that is, our prior involvement and partiality, not
as a barrier to understanding, but rather as its enabling
condition. It is this conception that is worked out in detail in
Truth and Method.

One might respond to Gadamer’s emphasis on our prior hermeneutic
involvement, whether in the experience of art or elsewhere, that such
involvement cannot but remain subjective simply on the grounds that it
is always determined by our particular dispositions to experience
things in certain ways rather than others—our involvement, one
might say, is thus always based on subjective prejudice. Such
an objection can be seen as a simple reiteration of the basic tendency
towards subjectivism that Gadamer rejects, but Gadamer also takes
issue directly with this view of prejudice and the negative
connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather
than closing us off, our prejudices are themselves what open us up to
what is to be understood. In this way Gadamer can be seen as
attempting to retrieve a positive conception of prejudice (German
Vorurteil) that goes back to the meaning of the term
as literally a pre-judgment (from the Latin
prae-judicium) that was lost during the Renaissance. In
Truth and Method, Gadamer redeploys the notion of our prior
hermeneutical situatedness as it is worked out in more particular
fashion in Heidegger’s Being and Time (first published in
1927) in terms of the ‘fore-structures’ of understanding, that
is, in terms of the anticipatory structures that allow what is to be
interpreted or understood to be grasped in a preliminary fashion. The
fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory
structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms
the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always
involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood
constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that
is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.

Gadamer’s positive conception of prejudice as pre-judgment is
connected with several ideas in his approach to hermeneutics. The
way in which our prejudgments open us up to the matter at issue in
such a way that those prejudgments are themselves capable of being
revised exhibits the character of the Gadamerian conception of
prejudgment, and its role in understanding, as itself constituting a
version of the hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutical priority Gadamer
assigns to prejudgment is also tied to Gadamer’s emphasis on the
priority of the question in the structure of understanding—the
latter emphasis being something Gadamer takes both from Platonic
dialectic and also, in Truth and Method, from the work of
R. G. Collingwood. Moreover, the indispensable role of prejudgment in
understanding connects directly with Gadamer’s rethinking of the
traditional concept of hermeneutics as necessarily involving, not
merely explication, but also
application. In this respect, all interpretation, even of the
past, is necessarily ‘prejudgmental’ in the sense that it is always
oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present
concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with
the matter at issue. Here, of course, there is a further connection
with the Aristotelian emphasis on the practical—not only is
understanding a matter of the application of something like ‘practical
wisdom’, but it is also always determined by the practical context out
of which it arises.

The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we
understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our
own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at
issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the
fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is
to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in
that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they
can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn. While
Gadamer has claimed that ‘temporal distance’ can play a
useful role in enabling us better to identify those prejudices that
exercise a problematic influence on understanding (Gadamer
acknowledges that prejudices can sometimes distort—the point is
that they do not always do so), it seems better to see the dialogical
interplay that occurs in the process of understanding itself as the
means by which such problematic elements are identified and worked
through. One consequence of Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice is a
positive evaluation of the role of authority and tradition as
legitimate sources of knowledge, and this has often been seen, most
famously by Jürgen Habermas, as indicative of Gadamer’s
ideological conservatism—Gadamer himself viewed it as merely
providing a proper corrective to the over-reaction against these ideas
that occurred with the Enlightenment.

Inasmuch as understanding always occurs against the background of our
prior involvement, so it always occurs on the basis of our
history. Understanding, for Gadamer, is thus always an
‘effect’ of history, while hermeneutical
‘consciousness’ is itself that mode of being that is conscious
of its own historical ‘being effected’—it is
‘historically-effected consciousness’
(wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). Awareness of the
historically effected character of understanding is, according to
Gadamer, identical with an awareness of the hermeneutical situation
and he also refers to that situation by means of the phenomenological
concept of ‘horizon’
(Horizont)—understanding and interpretation thus always
occurs from within a particular ‘horizon’ that is
determined by our historically-determined situatedness. Understanding
is not, however, imprisoned within the horizon of its
situation—indeed, the horizon of understanding is neither static
nor unchanging (it is, after all, always subject to the effects of
history). Just as our prejudices are themselves brought into question
in the process of understanding, so, in the encounter with another, is
the horizon of our own understanding susceptible to change.

Gadamer views understanding as a matter of negotiation between oneself
and one’s partner in the hermeneutical dialogue such that the process
of understanding can be seen as a matter of coming to an
‘agreement’ about the matter at issue. Coming to such an
agreement means establishing a common framework or
‘horizon’ and Gadamer thus takes understanding to be a
process of the ‘fusion of horizons’
(Horizontverschmelzung). In phenomenology, the
‘horizon’ is, in general terms, that larger context of
meaning in which any particular meaningful presentation is
situated. Inasmuch as understanding is taken to involve a
‘fusion of horizons’, then so it always involves the
formation of a new context of meaning that enables integration of what
is otherwise unfamiliar, strange or anomalous. In this respect, all
understanding involves a process of mediation and dialogue between
what is familiar and what is alien in which neither remains
unaffected. This process of horizonal engagement is an ongoing one
that never achieves any final completion or complete
elucidation—moreover, inasmuch as our own history and tradition
is itself constitutive of our own hermeneutic situation as well as
being itself constantly taken up in the process of understanding, so
our historical and hermeneutic situation can never be made completely
transparent to us. As a consequence, Gadamer explicitly takes issue
with the Hegelian ‘philosophy of reflection’ that aims at
just such completion and transparency.

In contrast with the traditional hermeneutic account, Gadamer thus
advances a view of understanding that rejects the idea of understanding
as achieved through gaining access to some inner realm of subjective
meaning. Moreover, since understanding is an ongoing process, rather
than something that is ever completed, so he also rejects the idea that
there is any final determinacy to understanding. It is on this basis
that Gadamer argues against there being any method or technique for
achieving understanding or arriving at truth. The search for a
methodology for the Geisteswissenschaften that would place
them on a sound footing alongside the ‘sciences of nature’ (the
Naturwissenschaften)—a search that had characterized
much previous hermeneutical inquiry—is thus shown to be
fundamentally misguided. Not only is there no methodology that
describes the means by which to arrive at an understanding of the
human or the historical, but neither is there any such methodology
that is adequate to the understanding of the non-human or the
natural. Gadamer’s conception of understanding as not reducible to
method or technique, along with his insistence of understanding as an
ongoing process that has no final completion, not only invites
comparison with ideas to be found in the work of the later
Wittgenstein, but can also be seen as paralleling developments in
post-Kuhnian philosophy of science.

The basic model of understanding that Gadamer finally arrives at in
Truth and Method is that of conversation. A conversation
involves an exchange between conversational partners that seeks
agreement about some matter at issue; consequently, such an exchange
is never completely under the control of either conversational
partner, but is rather determined by the matter at issue. Conversation
always takes place in language and similarly Gadamer views
understanding as always linguistically mediated. Since both
conversation and understanding involve coming to an agreement, so
Gadamer argues that all understanding involves something like a common
language, albeit a common language that is itself formed in the
process of understanding itself. In this sense, all understanding is,
according to Gadamer, interpretative, and, insofar as all
interpretation involves the exchange between the familiar and the
alien, so all interpretation is also translative. Gadamer’s commitment
to the linguisticality of understanding also commits him to a view of
understanding as essentially a matter of conceptual articulation. This
does not rule out the possibility of other modes of understanding, but
it does give primacy to language and conceptuality in hermeneutic
experience. Indeed, Gadamer takes language to be, not merely some
instrument by means of which we are able to engage with the world, but
as instead the very medium for such engagement. We are
‘in’ the world through being ‘in’
language. This emphasis on the linguisticality of understanding does
not, however, lead Gadamer into any form of linguistic relativism.
Just as we are not held inescapably captive within the circle of our
prejudices, or within the effects of our history, neither are we held
captive within language. Language is that within which anything that
is intelligible can be comprehended, it is also that within which we
encounter ourselves and others. In this respect, language is itself
understood as essentially dialogue or conversation. Like Wittgenstein,
as well as Davidson, Gadamer thus rejects the idea of such a thing as
a ‘private language’—language always involves others,
just as it always involves the world.

Gadamer claims that language is the universal horizon of hermeneutic
experience; he also claims that the hermeneutic experience is itself
universal. This is not merely in the sense that the experience of
understanding is familiar or ubiquitous. The universality of
hermeneutics derives from the existential claim for hermeneutics that
Heidegger advanced in the 1920s and that Gadamer made into a central
idea in his own thinking. Hermeneutics concerns our fundamental mode
of being in the world and understanding is thus the basic phenomenon
in our existence. We cannot go back ‘behind’
understanding, since to do so would be to suppose that there was a
mode of intelligibility that was prior to understanding. Hermeneutics
thus turns out to be universal, not merely in regard to knowledge,
whether in the ‘human sciences’ or elsewhere, but to all
understanding and, indeed, to philosophy itself. Philosophy is, in
its essence, hermeneutics. Gadamer’s claim for the universality of
hermeneutics was one of the explicit points at issue in the debate
between Gadamer and Habermas (see Ormiston & Schrift [eds.] 1990);
it can also be seen as, in a certain sense, underlying the engagement
between Gadamer and Derrida (see Michelfelder & Palmer [eds.]
1989), although in Derrida’s case this consisted in a denial of the
primacy of understanding, and the possibility of agreement, on which
hermeneutics itself rests.

Gadamer’s commitment to the historically conditioned character of
understanding, coupled with the hermeneutic imperative that we engage
with our historical situatedness, means that he takes philosophy to
itself stand in a critical relation to the history of philosophy.
Gadamer’s own thought certainly reflects a hermeneutical commitment to
both philosophical dialogue and historical engagement. His public
debates with contemporary figures such as Habermas and Derrida,
although they have not always lived up to Gadamer’s own ideals of
hermeneutic dialogue (at least not in respect of Derrida), have
provided clear evidence of Gadamer’s own commitment to such engagement.
The dialogue with philosophy and its history also makes up a large part
of Gadamer’s published work and, while that dialogue has encompassed a
range of thinkers, its primary focus has been on Plato, Aristotle,
Hegel and Heidegger.

In the case of Plato and Aristotle (see Gadamer 1980, 1986a, 1991),
Gadamer has argued for a particular way of reading both thinkers that
attends to the character of their texts, that takes those texts to
display a high degree of consistency, and that, particularly in the
later work, also views Plato and Aristotle as holding essentially
similar views. In The Beginning of Philosophy (1997a),
Gadamer also takes Plato and Aristotle as providing the indispensable
point of entry to an understanding of Pre-Socratic thought. When it
comes to Hegel (see Gadamer 1971), although there is much that
Gadamer finds sympathetic to his own hermeneutic project (particularly
Hegel’s attempt to move beyond the dichotomy of subject and object, as
well as aspects of Hegel’s revival of ancient dialectic), Gadamer’s
commitment to a hermeneutics of finitude (and so to what Hegel terms
‘bad infinity’) places him in direct opposition to the
Hegelian philosophy of reflection that aims at totality and
completion. It is with Heidegger, however, that Gadamer had his most
significant, sustained and yet also most problematic philosophical
engagement (see especially Gadamer 1994a). Although Gadamer
emphasized the continuities between his own work and that of
Heidegger, and was clearly gratified by those occasions when Heidegger
gave his approval to Gadamer’s work, he can also be seen as involved
in a subtle reworking of Heidegger’s ideas. On a number of points,
that reworking has a rather different character from that which is
explicit in Heidegger. In particular, Gadamer argues that Heidegger’s
attempts, in his later thinking, to find a
‘non-metaphysical’ path of thought led Heidegger into a
situation in which he experienced a ‘lack of (or need for)
language’ (a Sprachnot). Gadamer’s own
work can thus be seen as an attempt to take up the path of Heidegger’s
later thought in a way that does not abandon, but rather attempts to
work with our existing language. Similarly, while Heidegger views the
history of philosophy as characterized by a ‘forgetting’
of being—a forgetting that is inaugurated by Plato—Gadamer takes
the history of philosophy to have no such tendency. In this respect,
many of the differences between Gadamer and Heidegger become clearest
in their differing readings of the philosophical tradition, as well as
in their approaches to poets such as Hölderlin.

The engagement with literature and art has been a continuing feature
throughout Gadamer’s life and work and, in particular, Gadamer has
written extensively on poets such as Celan, Goethe, Hölderlin,
and Rilke (see especially Gadamer 1994b, 1997c). Gadamer’s engagement
with art is strongly influenced by his dialogue with the history of
philosophy, and he draws explicitly on Hegel as well as Plato. At the
same time, that engagement provides an exemplification of Gadamer’s
hermeneutics as well as a means to develop it further, while his
hermeneutic approach to art itself constitutes a rethinking of
aesthetics through the integration of aesthetics into hermeneutics. In
contrast to much contemporary aesthetics, Gadamer takes the experience
of beauty to be central to an understanding of the nature of art and
in the final pages of Truth and Method, he discusses the
beautiful as that which is self-evidently present to us (as
‘radiant’) exploring also the close relationship between
the beautiful and the true. Of particular importance in his writing
about art and literature are the three ideas that appear in the
subtitle to ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ (1986b): art
as play, symbol and festival. The role of play is a central notion in
Gadamer’s hermeneutic thinking generally, providing the basis for
Gadamer’s account of the experience both of art and understanding (see
Aesthetics and Subjectivism
above). The symbolic character of the artwork is seen, by Gadamer,
not in terms of any form of simple ‘representationalism’,
but instead in terms of the character of art as always showing
something more than is literally present to us in the work (this
aspect of art as referring outside itself is also taken up by Gadamer
elsewhere in relation to the character of art as
‘imitation’—mimesis). The artwork, no matter
what its medium, opens up, through its symbolic character, a space in
which both the world, and our own being in the world, are brought to
light as a single, but inexhaustibly rich totality. In the experience
of art, we are not merely given a ‘moment’ of vision, but
are able to ‘dwell’ along with the work in a way that
takes us out of ordinary time into what Gadamer calls
‘fulfilled’ or ‘autonomous’ time. Thus the artwork
has a festive, as well as symbolic and playful character, since the
festival similarly takes us out of ordinary time, while also opening
us up to the true possibility of community.

Gadamer’s emphasis on application in understanding already implies
that all understanding has a practical orientation in the sense of
being determined by our contemporary situation. Gadamer has himself
engaged, however, in more direct reflection on a range of contemporary
issues (see Gadamer 1976a, 1989a, 1993b, 1998b, 1999, 2001, see also
Krajewski 2003). Much of Gadamer’s discussion of these issues depends
upon the hermeneutic ideas he has worked out elsewhere. A central
concern in many of Gadamer’s essays is the role of Europe, and
European culture, in the contemporary world—something that was
especially pressing for Gadamer with the advent of German
reunification and the expansion of the European community (see
especially Gadamer 1989a). Here, however, a number of other closely
connected issues also come into view: the nature and role of modern
science and technology (see especially 1976a, 1998b), and together
with this, the role of the humanities; the question of education and,
in particular, of humanistic education (1992); the issue of
understanding between cultures, and especially between religions. In
addition, Gadamer has written on matters concerning law, ethics, the
changing character of the modern university, the connection between
philosophy and politics, and the nature of medical practice and the
concept of health (see especially Gadamer 1993b).

In almost all of these areas, Gadamer’s approach is characterized,
not by the attempt to apply any pre-existing theory to the domain in
question, but rather by the attempt to think from within that domain,
and in a way that is attentive to it. As Gadamer comments in Truth
and Method, ‘application is neither a subsequent nor merely
an occasional part of the phenomenon of understanding, but
co-determines it as a whole from the beginning’ (Gadamer 1989b,
324). Theory and application do not occur, then, in separation from
one another, but are part of a single hermeneutical
‘practice’.

Gadamer’s interest in practical philosophy has been reflected in
the way his work has itself been taken up within many other
domains—within, for instance, medical practice (e.g., Svenaues
2003), intercultural studies (e.g., Garfield 2002, Lammi 2008)),
education (e.g., Fairfield 2012), environmental education and ecology
(e.g., Grün 2005), literary studies (e.g., Weinsheimer 1991),
architecture (e.g., Snodgrass and Coyne 2006), law (e.g., Mootz 2007
(Other Internet Resources)), and also theology (e.g., Lawrence
2002—on all of these topics, see also the various chapters in
Section V of Malpas & Gander 2014).

1986a, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian
Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith, New Haven: Yale
University Press.

1986b, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays,
trans. by N. Walker, ed. by R. Bernasconi, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

1989b, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn. (1st English edn,
1975, trans. by W, Glen-Doepel, ed. by John Cumming and Garret
Barden), revised translation by J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, New
York: Crossroad. [Since the appearance of the 2nd revised edition in
1989, Truth and Method has been republished in various
formats by Continuum, and more recently Bloomsbury, without
substantive change to the text, but unfortunately without maintaining
any uniformity of pagination.]

Makita, Etsura, 1995, Gadamer-Bibliographie (1922-1994),
New York: Peter Lang (in German). (This is the definitive bibliographic
source for works by and about Gadamer; for corrections and additions
to this bibliography see the entry for the ‘Gadamer Home
Page’ in Other Internet Resources below.)

Ormiston, Gayle and Alan Schrift (eds.), 1990, The Hermeneutic
Tradition, Albany: SUNY Press. (Contains a number of writings by
Gadamer and others relevant to the debate with Habermas as well as
Betti.)

Palmer, Richard, E., 1969, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory
in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Evanston,
Northwestern University Press. (One of the first detailed accounts of
Gadamer’s thinking, and of hermeneutic theory generally, available in
English.)